The Fitzwilliam Museum: a source of inspiration

Already a source for M. R. James (writer of ghost stories and Director of the Fitzwilliam) at the
beginning of the 20th century, the Fitzwilliam Museum has continued to inspire. This exhibition traces how contemporary
ceramicists, musicians, painters, photographers, sculptors and writers
have responded to the Fitzwilliam Museum and its collections.
Contributors

The impact of museums and their collections on artists and writers has taken many forms. For example, when Marc Chagall arrived in Paris in 1910, the young Russian painter went directly from the train station to the Musée du Louvre.
'Going to the Louvre', he said later, 'is like reading the Bible or Shakespeare.'
Training ground and source of inspiration for generations of artists – most
notably Turner, Ingres, Manet, Degas, Cézanne and Picasso – the
Musée du Louvre also provided the French modernist painter Henri
Matisse with a wealth of ideas. A regular copyist during his student days,
he returned to the Louvre in 1915 and entered into a dialogue with Jan
Davidsz. de Heem, the seventeenth-century Dutch master of flower and fruit
still lifes. What emerged was another major still life, closely modelled
on the old master, yet also unquestionably modern in interpretation.

Henri MatisseStill Life after Jan Davidsz.
de Heem's
’Le Dessert’France, 1915,
Museum of Modern Art, New York

But if the influence of paintings crossed borders and centuries, it also
had an impact on other art forms. One of the most pertinent examples is
Modest Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition – a
Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann (Картинки с выставки – Воспоминание о Викторе Гартмане), later arranged
for orchestra by Maurice Ravel. Composed in St Petersburg in 1874, it is
Mussorgsky’s
musical record of a visit he paid to a commemorative exhibition. Mounted
in honour of his artist friend Viktor Hartmann, it included over 400 architectural
drawings, watercolours and paintings, now largely lost. Mussorgsky set
ten of these a musical monument. Remarkably, the composition also documents
his progress through the exhibition as well as the sorrow he felt over
his friend’s
death. Opened by way of a Promenade, the lead theme later reappears in
the form of interludes and shows Mussorgsky move from picture to picture.
It eventually merges into some of the 'pictures' - The
Catacombes (picture
no. 8) and The Great Gate of Kiev (picture no. 10) – and expresses
the intense loss Mussorgsky felt when visiting the exhibition.

To explore who has been inspired by Samuel Palmer’s The Magic Apple Tree, as well
as antiquities, armour, ceramics, coins, manuscripts, sculptures and other
paintings in the collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum, select "Contributors" in the navigation bar on the left.